90 entity spawn limit...

Do non aggressive entities, such as cows, chickens and sheep count towards the 64x64 90 entity limit?Do "farm" animals de-spawn in the town safe area? I put 4 squid in the mote I'd built on my residence site and the next day they were gone. Can I build my cow farm in town, or do I need to make a frontier claim and build there?

Good question-Yes, non aggressive entities do count towards your max entity level. And just for future reference, no aggressive entities can spawn on your res, including snow and iron golems. And no, "Farm animals" don't despawn... The same thing happened to my squids

The entity count on your residence is for passive mobs anyways. Cows, sheep, pigs, chickens etc. will be perfectly fine there, including bats, but squids do despawn for some reason. They used to stay, so perhaps there was some reason as to why they despawn now, but I cannot answer that part myself.

Ok so:-The entity limit on your residence is 100. All entities count towards it, so all villagers and animals will increase it.-In the frontier and wastelands, the limit is 250 entities in the 64x64 area around you, so all monsters, animals and neutral mobs will count towards it. It also means you can have 250 monsters or 250 animals, there's no limit on entity type.-Farm animals shouldn't despawn or even be able to leave your residence. Squids and ocelots (not the tamed ones) are simply weird and like to disappear. Also, squid spawning is disabled in town, so you can't make a squid farm on your residence (probably related to your despawning issue).-Your cow farm should work. If it hits the entity limit it will simply stop spawning cows until there is entity space.More info on entity limits can be found here:http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/technical-changes-from-vanilla-minecraft/#entity-limits

A mc update made squid despawn so that may be why they despawn now. Before the update, squid used to sink to the bottom and never despawned so no one could find the ones in the ocean.

My problem is the squid farm. In the desert a long way from any water and all setup like the vids but only 34 ink sacs in 4 hours. This farm is supposed to produce 3000 per hour (dont need that many but got carried away). I could have filled a dc just hanging out at an outpost.

A mc update made squid despawn so that may be why they despawn now. Before the update, squid used to sink to the bottom and never despawned so no one could find the ones in the ocean.

My problem is the squid farm. In the desert a long way from any water and all setup like the vids but only 34 ink sacs in 4 hours. This farm is supposed to produce 3000 per hour (dont need that many but got carried away). I could have filled a dc just hanging out at an outpost.

Where have all the squidies gone?

Probably entity limit./entc nearby, check how many mobs are around. Light up all the caves, slab the surface, make sure no mobs other than squids can spawn.

Wilderness spawn area for entity limit is 64 from you on each side, so 128 x 128 x 128

The best place to make things with entity count issues in the frontier is as high as possible. In my testing at 160 height, I could see some ground mobs show up, at 190 and above things were clear. type /entc to see your count. This won't help much for squid though, since they only spawn from 46-62 level

For natural generation, there is a limit of 90 hostile or 90 peaceful mobs. There is also a check to see if there are 2 or more of that type of mob in area (20 wide, I bet this is whats killing your squid farm).

Squid farms are going to be a bit limited on our server, you'll want to kill them as fast as you possibly can. I'm not sure if it works in 1.7, but squids will spawn in lava in 1.8, so that might give you a faster farm.http://youtu.be/FpIvCmHum9w

You'll definitely want to stay in a desert also, as it feels like the passive mob spawning is turned way up on EMC, I can't keep a 64 block area cleared of sheep, pigs and chickens if I wanted to in other biomes.

Another note is that the spawn distance of 64 blocks and the entc is based on your location. So for squid farm, you could have it at level 60ish and afk at level 110. This would save you slabbing or tracking down mob spawns deep under ground (really hard to do).

No problem. The lava should kill them quick also, so it shouldn't bother you too much. It looks like the 64 blocks for mobs to despawn is a sphere, so if you afk up top, go straight up or stay a little lower.

If you want to up your production more, you could make multiple farms (thinking 4-8, maybe more depending on size) 18 blocks away from each other, just remember you'll need to afk lower the wider it is. I'd really recommend the lava farm also if you're up for carrying all the buckets, since they can't swim in it, they just fall out and die quick. I couldn't find anything that said it was 1.8 only, should work fine in 1.7.